Roman Kogler (Thomas Schubert) is 19 years old and has lived all his life in institutions. Abandoned by his mother as a young child and raised in an orphanage, he is now serving time in a juvenile detention centre having accidentally killed a boy of his own age in a brawl. A solitary boy with an uncommunicative attitude, he has no friends, family or connections to turn to in the outside world. But when threatened with a life behind bars unless he finds a job and sticks to it, he eventually finds a probation job shifting dead bodies at the municipal morgue in Vienna. When Roman is one day faced with a dead woman who bears his family name, it occurs to him that this may be the mother who gave him up for adoption and he begins to explore his past.